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If Programming Languages Were People: The Office Edition

Pachi 🥑 on July 05, 2024

It is Friday again, and as you may know, I aim to make Fridays a bit more fun here. So today, imagine if the programming languages we use every day...
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Tracy Gilmore

I take issue with the JavaScript quote.
In order to refactor you ideally need unit tests to alert you to any faults you create in the process.
Most JS devs are either unaware of what unit test are, what they are for or are of the opinion "We don't need unit tests, we have a load of end-to-end tests.", "Besides, what's to test? we maintain code directly in production."

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Gopikrishna Sathyamurthy

I agree, all the quotes seem to describe the languages' personality, but JavaScript, I'd say the quote is a developer's, not the language; and quite frankly a language-independent mindset 😄. People who practice XP, like me, follow the principles irrespective of the platform we work in including JavaScript.

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Alois Sečkár

That doesn't mean you cannot talk about "refactoring tomorrow" all day long though...

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Corbin Taylor

C is the server gremlin. No one sees them, and no one really wants to work with them, but they all desperately need them to do anything. Further, no one really knows how long they've been there, nor does anyone dare to get rid of them.

Rust is C's intern that everyone insists that C hire. Rust is actually really good at what they do, but every time they try to do something, they learn that C already did it decades ago.

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Corbin Taylor

Fortran is the retired founder from decades prior, who still occasionally shows up to office parties despite no one remembering them.

COBOL is similar to Fortran, but everyone is afraid of because they still have enough shares to be on the Board of Directors.

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Alex Garcia • Edited

FORTRAN and COBOL have no similarity, take a look to some samples of code, please.
These languages are simply nearly equally old.
Take care when you travel in planes, reservation systems still run on FORTRAN :)))

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Corbin Taylor • Edited

I mean similar in the analogy, not similar in syntax.

Also, I've written Fortran. Personally, I don't understand why anyone would willingly submit themselves to the language anymore, but legacy systems are legacy systems.

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Corbin Taylor

And yes, I understand that there are plenty of fields that use Fortran extensively (e.g., computational physics).

Again though, if I have the option, I'd rather be using C.

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Anuj Kumbhar

To the point

 
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Rene Kootstra

Completely agree, as such for my own projects I do not use TS but companies sadly, but understandably, require it.

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Brian Lacy

Not following... TS is just JS with rules/discipline. It literally transpiles to minified ES5. What exactly is the concern here?

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Rene Kootstra

Well TS is a subset of JS. The additional compilation step. The dev environment bloatware. Adding a lot of code just for types. Etc...

Because of that it is my preference to use JS over TS. I built my own framework to work effectively with JS and never been more productive.

Some people and companies prefer TS and if they are productive with TS they should stick with TS. Because in the end it is only important that you deliver a product that works and preferably on time.

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David J Eddy

The best description for PHP. Love it.

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H.elyasi

Javascript 🤠

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lawrence Amo

I would like to see C# and GO

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Rene Kootstra

Spaghetti is because of a bad developer. Language has nothing to do with it. I have programmed with C/C++, Java, .Net and various other languages for over 20 years. Now only in JavaScript. Frontend, Backend and even Cloud.

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Daniel Cumings

Would like to see C#. The personification would be somewhere between java,ruby and C++. C# constantly tries to reinvent itself, constantly modernizing the language to keep up with the times. It has a lot of structure but can be extremely simple/intuitive to use.

 
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Paul Fox

Let's not forget the primary difference between TS and JSDoc. If you make a mistake describing your class in JSDoc your project still compiles. You also don't have to spend hours configuring a compiler for it!

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Joe • Edited

Thanks AI for writing this post and creating the images

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Alex Garcia

It seems no one remember PASCAL, BASIC, PL/1, NATURAL, PROLOG, MODULA, or the infinite Assemblers of any hardware architecture.

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John Watts

Python - "Let’s keep this simple and readable, shall we?"

"Yes, let's make sure the flow of the code is determined by characters we can't see."